The Morning Risk Report: Adidas Runs Into Supply-Chain Problems

By Kristin Broughton

Adidas Chief Executive Kasper Rorsted said the company didn’t have the capacity to keep up with growing demand. PHOTO: DANIEL KARMANN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Adidas AG said a supply-chain bottleneck in North America would prevent it from meeting demand for its products in coming months. The news sent the company's shares down amid concerns the world’s second-largest sporting-goods maker could lose its footing in one of its most important markets.

Chief Executive Kasper Rorsted said the company didn’t have the manufacturing capacity to keep up with growing demand for its midprice apparel, a problem he estimated would cost the company between €200 million and €400 million ($225 million and $450 million).

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Adidas has redirected investments and management resources to North America over the past four years to better compete with industry leader Nike Inc., and the market there has become one of its most important. Revenue in North America adjusted for currency movements rose 15% to €4.7 billion in 2018, about one-fifth of overall sales, tied with Asia-Pacific as Adidas’s fastest-growing sales region.

Mr. Rorsted said the supply-chain challenges had arisen from strategic decisions Adidas had made earlier as it began sharpening its focus on the U.S., where it traditionally has the lowest market share relative to its competitors.

Compliance

An indictment charging Paul Manafort with residential mortgage fraud was unsealed Wednesday in state court in New York—minutes after the former Trump campaign chairman was sentenced in the second of his two federal trials. The 16 counts, which include falsifying business records and a scheme to defraud, center on what state prosecutors say was a yearlong mortgage-fraud scheme in which Mr. Manafort falsified business records to obtain millions of dollars. A
spokesman for Mr. Manafort didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether $100,000 donated to a Trump-related political fundraising committee originated from a fugitive Malaysian businessman alleged to be at the center of a global financial scandal, according to people familiar with the matter.

The state-backed owner of China’s ZTE Corp. is cutting its stake in the telecommunications giant. ZTE, the world’s No. 5 maker of telecom equipment, lost billions of dollars in revenue when the U.S. Commerce Department barred it from buying components from the American technology companies it relies on. The ban—imposed for breaking the terms of a settlement resolving its sanctions-busting sales to Iran and North Korea—was in place for three months before being lifted by the Trump administration in July.

Music-streaming service Spotify Technology SA has filed an antitrust complaint in Europe against Apple Inc., a new salvo in the broader battle over whether and how to rein in global tech giants. Spotify’s complaint alleges that Apple in recent years has abused its control over which apps appear in its App Store with the aim of limiting competition with its streaming service Apple Music.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the Federal Aviation Administration would groundBoeing Co.’s fleet of 737 MAX airliners in a major safety setback for the U.S. plane maker. The global grounding of Boeing's most popular model is likely to generate a host of business challenges for the aerospace giant.

Convenience stores and gas stations will effectively be banned from selling most flavored e-cigarettes under restrictions issued by the Food and Drug Administration. The new directives for retailers and manufacturers are aimed at limiting access to the e-cigarette flavors most popular among children and teens, whose use of the devices surged last year.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV is recalling nearly 863,000 of its vehicles in the U.S. after some didn’t meet federal emissions standards, marking the latest disclosure by an auto maker of troubles complying with U.S. regulations.

Drugmaker Mylan NV said the Securities and Exchange Commission closed a three-year-old investigation into real-estate dealings with a former director, without taking any enforcement action.

Strategy

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the country’s largest bank, said Wednesday that it expects to open 90 branches by the end of 2019 in cities such as Charlotte, N.C., Minneapolis and Nashville, Tenn., as part of its broader plan to enter new markets. JPMorgan said it aims to hire as many as 700 employees by the end of 2019 as well.

Starbucks Corp. built its empire in China on the idea that consumers there would want to be seen inside its posh cafes. Now the Seattle-based company is struggling to keep up as local upstart Luckin Coffee wins over a new kind of Chinese customer—one who wants their caffeine jolt delivered in minutes. The company’s sudden rise has put Starbucks, Luckin and McDonald’s Corp. in a race to build the delivery system best tuned to the frenetic Chinese market.

Architectural Digest, the Condé Nast magazine best known for its design savvy and access to celebrity homes, is launching a business-to-business digital offering for architects, decorators and contractors as the publisher moves to cater to professionals. The platform, an online premium section of Architectural Digest called AD Pro, will go live on April 2, Condé Nast told The Wall Street Journal.

Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is buying a majority stake in Oaktree Capital Management, bringing an end to the credit-investment firm’s six-year run as a public company. Brookfield will buy about 62% of the Oaktree business, acquiring all outstanding shares of its publicly traded common stock for $49 in cash, or 1.077 Brookfield shares.

Fintech investors are flocking to Mexico to try to fill a gap in the country’s credit market: loans to young businesses looking to expand. The latest example is Goldman SachsGroup Inc., which is providing a credit line of up to $100 million to Credijusto, a four-year-old financial technology firm in Mexico City.

Operations

Robots work on a VW Passat car at a Volkswagen plant in Emden, Germany. PHOTO: JOERG SARBACH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Volkswagen AG plans to cut as many as 7,000 administrative positions over the next five years amid an industrywide scramble to slash costs and make room on the balance sheet for heavy spending on electric and self-driving cars. The German auto maker said that the job cuts will be at its namesake VW brand, the company’s biggest division. The cuts would amount to about 6% of the brand’s domestic workforce of 119,394 employees.

Facebook Inc.’s popular Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp apps were inaccessible for millions of users for much of Wednesday and into Thursday. A Facebook status page for developers listed the outage as lasting 11 hours early Thursday on the East Coast, making it one of the longer disruptions of recent years.

Governance

Nissan’s Denis Le Vot, a senior executive who spearheaded Carlos Ghosn’s U.S. strategy, will take the helm of the alliance’s light commercial vehicle unit. PHOTO: JOHN G. MABANGLO/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

The auto alliance of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi is shuffling management in the wake of Carlos Ghosn’s arrest and dismissal, reassigning senior executives who worked alongside the auto titan.

Nissan Motor Co. said Wednesday that Denis Le Vot, who spearheaded Mr. Ghosn’s contentious U.S. strategy, will return to France to lead the alliance’s light-commercial-vehicle unit. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. said two senior executives close to Mr. Ghosn plan to leave the company.

At Renault SA, Mouna Sepehri, who worked closely with Mr. Ghosn as his chief of legal, public affairs and communications, is relinquishing the role to become an adviser to CEO Thierry Bolloré, according to people familiar with the matter. Two other executives at the French auto maker will also leave the company, the people said.

Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive Timothy Sloan received $18.4 million in compensation for 2018, including a $2 million incentive award, according to a securities filing on Wednesday. The disclosure comes a day after the bank received a rare rebuke from a top regulator, minutes after Mr. Sloan finished testifying in Congress, and as regulators consider whether to force out top executives or directors.

A former UBS Group AG employee in London who alleges a more senior colleague raped her in 2017 is suing the Swiss bank for sexual harassment and discrimination. The alleged rapist was an employee of the bank who was senior to his accuser and who had influence over her career, according to a statement Wednesday from the alleged victim’s lawyers describing parts of the claim.

Activist investor Nelson Peltz has been named strategic adviser to Aurora Cannabis Inc.’s board in a bid to help the Canadian marijuana producer with its global expansion ambitions. Mr. Peltz, co-founder and chief executive of Trian Fund Management LP, will work with the company to find ways to get Aurora’s products into various market segments.

Audit

Helicopters in February hovered over a mine to release flower petals in homage to victims killed after the collapse of a dam in Brumadinho, Brazil. PHOTO: ANDRE PENNER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Brazilian prosecutors are probing more than 100 high-risk dams across the country, saying they doubt the legitimacy of the safety audits carried out at the nation’s mines after Vale SA’s deadly dam collapse in January.

At the heart of the probe is whether faulty oversight practices prosecutors say led to the dam’s demise are widespread in Brazil. Investigators have focused on the relationship between the mining companies and dam auditors that may have led inspectors to sign documents certifying the troubled structures amid pressure or fear of losing other contracts.

“We have no confidence that these dam certifications are reliable,” José Adércio Leite Sampaio, the federal prosecutor coordinating the investigation, told the Journal.